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It's all fun and games until they literally atomize your entire body, assemble totally different atoms in a totally different place so they take on your former shape and call that "beaming."
I really appreciate the direction Enterprise took with this. The whole crew was just terrified to use the damn thing. To be fair, it was new and relatively unproven technology, but the same central "just let the computer atomize you what could go wrong" flaw holds.
$0.02: It was great foreshadowing from episode 1 that they're gonna need it to get out of jam, and it's not guaranteed to even work. But the writers undid all that by letting the crew overcome technological and scientific inferiority way too fast. They could have made something far more compelling by having a crew that could make a go of it with zero conveniences. The show run could have ended with giving way to the next generation of explorers, who now have far more advanced tech than the NX-01 ever had; a much more compelling arc, IMO. It also robs T'pol of some of the gravity behind choosing to do something so reckless as to cruise the quadrant under such dangerous circumstances.
The problem with Enterprise is that it was kind sold as Star Trek before the transporters, before the shields, before the replicators, etc., but what we got instead was:
TransportersTransporters, but only if we really need to.Raise the shieldsPolarise the hull plating.ReplicatorProtein resequencer.Tractor beamGrappling hook.
They didn't actually write a story about what it was like without these things, just what it was like with slightly shittier versions of these things.
Enterprise doesn't get a lot of love, but I really enjoyed it and was sad when it got cut short.
Better than traffic
I thought the "beam" was the atoms in transit.
